In the Classroom at Last

Today was the first day of my renewable energy and energy efficiency course. We wound up with 28 enrolled students, plus a handful of faculty from the engineering department are sitting in.

I felt like it went pretty well. I walked into it feeling kind of stressed -- the enrollment period was officially over last Friday, but the university went on enrolling people literally up to the last hour before class started. This messed with my attempt to have a neat roster of students, have their Moodle (online system for sharing info w/ students) accounts set up ahead of time, etc. Plus the university booked me to go to two different radio stations in the last two days to do interviews promoting the course, eating up time that I had expected to spend polishing the lecture. But it all worked out OK, and the radio station visits were fun.

The students enrolled in the course are mostly working professionals, nearly all engineers with a few architects in the mix, probably with a median age of early to mid 30s. One of the engineers is a woman who works for the presidential administration, plus there's a hefty contingent of folks from CEL, the energy agency I visited last week with the big PV system on their roof. About a third of the students are enrolled in UDB's recently launched renewable energy master's program, and they too are mostly energy professionals who take the bulk of their classes on evenings and Saturdays. Given that most of the engineers are of the electrical variety, I felt a little silly about the very basic electricity coverage in the lecture (Ohm's law, series and parallel circuits, etc.), but they were all good-natured about it.

I dedicated the last 30 minutes or so of today's 3-hour class to a life cycle cost analysis of four different water heating options. I put a lot of effort into getting real local cost data based on utility rates and locally available equipment that I found in building supply stores. The students gave me good feedback on that exercise, said they found it very practical. I think I'm on the right track in emphasizing the practical. Beatriz Recinos, who was a Fulbright scholar at HSU last year in oceanography and is now back home in El Salvador, tells me and Basilia that Salvadoran university education tends to be very theoretical, and she found the practical focus at Humboldt refreshing.